Framers: Chapter 7 - Learning To See Through Many Frames
“Learning a wide variety of frames is crucial for progress. To improve, we must learn to view problems from multiple perspectives. A single classical lens may trap you. Being able to switch lenses raises the opportunity of finding better answers.” – Alan Y.
This is the main idea of Framers, Chapter 7, which essentially explains how individuals can train themselves to choose a framework and how organizations can make multi-framework thinking actually work, rather than collapsing into sameness.
Example of applying a new frame
Here’s an interesting math problem from this chapter:
An 8×8 checkerboard has two opposite-corner white squares removed. Can you cover the remaining 62 squares with 31 dominoes (each domino covers two adjacent squares)?
Typical (failing) approach: Trial-and-error arrangements of multiple attempts. The “placement frame”.
But if you think deeply, you will discover each domino always covers one black and one white square. Removing two white squares leaves unequal counts of white and black squares, so that kind of perfect coverage is impossible. The solution comes from reframing the representation, not from more persistence.
Why it matters
Problems of this kind are ubiquitous in real-world reasoning and decision-making. In these moments, we can’t sequentially reason our way through them. The very tools that improve our ability to apply a frame, that is, the frequent practice of counterfactual thinking, provide little help for choosing a frame. That presents a huge challenge. If we can’t do better at choosing a frame despite our advances in applying them, our framing will remain stunted. We will be stuck with an incomplete tool, the head of a hammer without a handle. We need a different strategy.
It may be tempting to think that mental diversity means exposing oneself to a great number of ideas, opinions, and views. But that misses the point. The advantage does not lie in Volume but in Variation.
Joel Podolny and Apple Academy
Joel Podolny – A top academic person (Harvard/Stanford/Yale) who changed the ordinary curriculum at Yale to a cross-disciplinary curriculum with many different models rather than one right template.
Steve Jobs wanted “Thinking Different” to become a transferable mental “identity”. Podolny built Apple University to institutionalize cognitive flexibility and to hold core concepts, yet drop them when better viewpoints emerge. That produces conflicts, but the benefits outweigh the costs. Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs, kept the emphasis on diversity as a performance advantage.
How to train multi-frame thinking
Adding new frames to our thinking in this way is helpful, but it also has limits. In business schools, the number of cases that students study is quite small, so they only learn a limited set of frames. This may give students the false idea that these few frames are enough to solve most real-world problems. As a result, they may not be ready for situations that require more radical changes in how they think.
This problem is not new. Wallace Donham, the Harvard Business School dean who first introduced the case study method, already saw this risk. During the Great Depression, he worried that the method was too narrow. In a 1933 article in Harvard Business Review, he wrote that it could produce business leaders who failed “to see things in wide relations.” Still, this is not a fatal flaw. It is better to know some useful frames than to have no frames at all.
The first and easiest strategy for adding mental models that are quite different from the ones we already know is to look at how others frame a problem. If we come in contact with new mental models, we can add them to our armory. Another strategy for increasing mental diversity is to raise our interest in new ideas. Call it “cognitive foraging”: the pursuit of new ways of thinking and seeing the world without the specific aim to acquire frames.